12 most colorful places on Earth

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The land is "to the brim" filled with different colors, but there are places where the palette of landscapes is amazing. Vivid colors are usually a sign of pigmented bacteria, sedimentary layers that have accumulated over millions of years, or other natural forces.

Take Caño Cristales, a river in Colombia famous for its vibrant colors. The river is called the liquid rainbow and is home to the sub-stem plants Macarenia clavigera, which color the water red, yellow, green and blue every year from July to November.

And here are some more examples of unusually colored places that adorn the surface of our planet.

Seven Colored Sands - Chamarel, Mauritius

The sand dunes in southwestern Mauritius are called seven-colored because of the colors mixed in the sands - red, purple, purple, blue, green, yellow and brown. The dunes were created by the gradual transformation of basaltic lava into clay minerals. Different colors are the result of different cooling temperatures of the rock. Interestingly, if you mix a handful of colored sand, the grains of sand will then settle again in different layers.

Laguna Colorado - Potosi, Bolivia

The shallow red salty lake is a gathering place for flocks of flamingos (most of all James's flamingos, but there are also Andean and Chilean flamingos). The red color gives the reddish pigment of the algae that live here.

Lake of Morning Glory - Yellowstone National Park, USA

The vibrant colors in this steam-covered pond are the work of pigmented thermophilic bacteria that thrive in extreme temperatures. Different shades of orange and yellow indicate changing temperatures.

Zhangye Danxia National Geopark - Gansu, China

Famous for its unusually colored sandstone. These vibrant cliffs are formed by mineral deposits that are 24 million years old.

Havasu Falls - Grand Canyon, USA

The bright green canyon and the delightful waterfalls that it contains are an oasis in the midst of a hot desert. The dark turquoise color of the water is the result of a high concentration of magnesium and calcium carbonate.

Painted Desert - Petrified Forest National Park, USA

The formation of layers of siltstone, shale and shale stretches along the northeast of Arizona for 19, 5 thousand square meters. km. The color of the landscape is the result of the abundance of iron and magnesium in the layers of the rock.

Danakil Depression - North Ethiopia

One of the hottest and lowest-lying places in the world. Danakil is known for yellow and green deposits of sulfur and salt. This place is often called the cradle of humanity. In 1974, the remains of Australopithecus afarensis, or Lucy, were found here.

Fly Geyser - Nevada, USA

A small but bright geyser that people created. While drilling a well in search of geothermal energy in 1964, engineers inadvertently released a geyser. Over the years, the mineral-rich water of the geyser, which constantly throws out fountains to a height of 1.5 meters, has also formed travertine hills. For the bright colors of the geyser, we must thank the pigmented thermophilic bacteria.

Chinoike Jigoku - Beppu, Japan

The name of this source is translated from Japanese as "cursed pond". And you won't want to plunge into it! I'm not kidding. The water temperature is 77.8 degrees Celsius, and people were tortured here before. Despite its dark history, red has little to do with blood. It's all about the high concentration of iron oxide.

Pink Beach - Sardinia, Italy

The sand of the beach contains coral and shellfish fragments that give it a cute pink hue. Next to the crystal clear blue water, the pink beach looks very impressive.

Colored Mines - Culhan, USA

Located in the east of downtown Colorado. Here are the hoodoo - complex ecosystems of plants and beautiful deposits of sedimentary rock.

Great Prismatic Spring - Yellowstone National Park, USA

The huge hot spring is the first largest in the United States and the third largest in the world. But people remember not its size, but its rainbow color. The Great Prismatic Spring is home to many pigmented bacteria that thrive on its mineral-rich edges.